Mercurial localhost "site" overview of code. Issues

Question

Mercurial offers the ability to view the code, logs, branches, etc... on a local webserver.

Simply entering the command "hg serve" in the folder of your project, will enable you to view all this on http://127.0.0.1:8000/

I have some issues here.

1) It seems like you can only do this for a single project at a time, since this reserves port 8000. So if I have a number of different projects that I want multiple people to be able to view at all times, what do I do?

2) The "files" overview lists all existing files right after each other. No tree structure or anything, it just lists them in one long line, going to newlines only by the fact that the CSS of the box has a max-width set. Is there a way around this, or am I stuck with it?

Answer 1

hg serve accepts a -p option that controls the listening port.

hg serve -p 8001

Answer 2

hg serve is meant to allow for example two coworkers to temporarily expose one's repo while the other will pull the changes. It's not made to be a full repo publishing service, it's only a very useful tool to communicate changes in a short time.

If you want to (permanently) expose serveral repo from your own server, you'll have to do more : http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/PublishingRepositories

You can also use a public hosting service like http://bitbucket.org (that allow for private project too for free, under conditions), Sourceforge.net or http://code.google.com/hosting (that only allow open-source projects).

Answer 3

Using the --web-conf parameter you can use an hgwebdir configuration file which specifies multiple repositories from the one URL.

I've actually found that if you don't want to mess around with setting up hgwebdir on apache, a good solution is to use mercurial-server to serve (push-pull) repositories over ssh (certificates only) and use hg serve to expose a read-only web view with the graph log, etc. Obviously this assumes that the web view isn't going to have a huge amount of traffic - if you need that, take the time to set up apache with mod_wsgi.

For example, my personal server (using mercurial-server with a home directory of /home/hg) has an /etc/init.d/hgserve which invokes something like:

hg serve --daemon --port 8000 --web-conf /home/hg/hgweb.config --accesslog /var/log/mercurial/access.log --errorlog /var/log/mercurial/error.log

hgweb.config just contains:

[paths]
repos = /home/hg/repos/*

This then displays a list of every repository it finds under /home/hg/repos. If I want to hide any (e.g. the hgadmin repo that mercurial-server uses) I just add the following to the repo's hgrc:

[web]
hidden = True

As the the files list - you might be able to get somewhere by modifying the templates and pass the --template parameter to hg serve. In your mercurial libraries will be the mercurial/templates directory - this contains all the templates that hg serve uses - copy it somewhere and then modify. The templates for the various web pages are in the mercurial/templates/paper directory (and mercurial/templates/static contains stylesheets and javascript).

Unfortunately the only modification I've made is to add a dotted line linking each node in the graph to its text (which I find makes the graph much more readable) so I don't know if you'll be able to do anything for the file list with just the templates.